


House H(a)unting

by DesertScribe



Category: Corpse Bride (2005), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: Attempts At Worldbuilding By Way Of Looking At Halloween Town's Housing Market, Gen, Hopefully Vaguely Amusing Ghosts Can Make Up The Difference, Not Nearly As Much Sally In The Story As There Should Have Been, This Is Fantasy Land So No One Ever Has To Wonder How They're Going To Afford A Mortgage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-07 04:51:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16401653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Emily tries to settle into her new life in Halloween Town by finding a home.  She suffers some of the woes unique to the local real estate market along the way.





	House H(a)unting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamiflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/gifts).



> Sorry there's no Ghost Whale. Please insert joke here about how I couldn't make it fit.

The young dead woman once known as the Corpse Bride but now simply Emily had flown into Halloween Town on a thousand butterfly wings swept along by a strong autumn gale. She had had little choice in her arrival, but now that she was here, she loved it and wanted to stay. It seemed as if the best way for Emily to make her accidental visit to Halloween Town into a permanent relocation was to make it official by acquiring a house. However, regardless of whether one is in the world of the living, in the world of the dead, or in one of the magically liminal holiday worlds in between, matters of real estate are always easier said than done.

Sally had originally planned to accompany Emily on her house hunting expedition, but Emily did not want to take up too much of her friend's already busy schedule for the day. Sally had protested that it would be no trouble at all, but then the Real Estate Ghoul turned out to be so flustered by the idea of extended one-on-one time with _the_ Sally Skellington that they all decided it would be better if Sally needed to sit this one out after all.

Then the real work began.

* * *

The first house Emily looked at was way too big. From what Emily had seen, only Jack Skellington's mansion and Dr. Finklestein's combination Laboratory/Observatory were larger.

It was located out beyond the western edge of town on a small hill which gave it a lovely view of all of Halloween Town, as well as the endless pumpkin fields sprawling away to the southwest, the aptly named Dark Forest to the west. The building itself was beautiful inside and out in its own creepy Halloween Town way, but Emily had no need for a full mansion with multiple ballrooms, more bedrooms, parlors, and drawing rooms than she knew what to do with, and a kitchen big enough to house a large family all on its own. It was a nice place to visit, but she wouldn't want to live there.

"It's a gorgeous place," Emily said, "but I don't think it's the place for me."

"Are you sure?" the Real Estate Ghoul said, clutching her clipboard anxiously in all four hands. "Sally Skellington said she wanted me to find the very best for you."

"This house might be the best for someone, probably a lot of different someones," Emily said, "but I'm not one of them." She kept her tone gentle, because she didn't blame the Real Estate Ghoul for trying. No one wanted to disappoint the Pumpkin Queen, not out of any kind of fear but because Sally was such a nice person that disappointing her was bound to leave the person who had done so feeling disappointed in themself.

"You should at least try the pipe organ before you make your decision," the Real Estate Ghoul wheedled. "Sally said you were a musician."

That got Emily's attention. "Well, if you insist," she said, trying not to sound too eager. She had been very curious to try the pipe organ when she first saw it taking up most of a wall in the mansion's largest ballroom, but she had decided it would have been rude to ask to play it when she was already well on her way to telling the Real Estate Ghoul that she wanted to go look at other, smaller houses. There had been a pipe organ in the church she had attended with her parents when she was alive, but no one had ever let her touch it, not even after she had been taking music lessons for years. She knew playing an organ was different than playing a piano, but until now she had never gotten the opportunity to finally experience just how different it was.

Emily followed the Real Estate Ghoul back into the ballroom and then settled herself on the bench in front of the pipe organ's console. She hit a few experimental notes, tested the pedals, then fiddled with some of the stops to see how they changed the sound. The playing technique took some getting used to, especially in terms of the dynamic range, but it really was quite fun to hit a note and hear a rich tone blast out and fill the room. Once Emily felt that she had a basic idea of how the organ behaved, she started improvising a song.

At first it went beautifully. Then, Emily's hit low D for the first time, and instead of producing the finely tuned sound which Emily had been expecting to hear, it bellowed out a noise like a large dying animal with a strange echo following a second later. None of the other notes had echoed quite like that.

The Real Estate Ghoul winced. "Oh," she said, "I had forgotten it did that."

"It's fine," Emily said and resumed playing, determined to turn her song into something beautiful, even if she need to avoid using low D in order to do so.

Unfortunately, hitting the low F key produced similar results, and this time the strange echo arrived after less than half a second.

"Maybe we should go," the Real Estate Ghoul said. "I think the organ may have gotten worse since the last time anyone tested it. It used to be just the one note that caused any problems."

"Yes," Emily reluctantly agreed, "that might be best." She reached out to play one final chord before leaving, but before her fingers made contact with the keys, another animal-like bellow sounded from nearby. "What?"

And then a large white gauzy shape bounded into the room, passing straight through one of the walls to get there. It was long and roughly rectangular with a wide pair of horns at one end and what might have been a tail at the other. It wore a brown leather collar with a large bell hanging off of it. It drifted without any feet to touch the floor, but Emily suspected that it must have had four hooves in life.

"Moo!" shouted the ghost cow. Then it wandered over to the organ and began poking at the keyboard with its nose, mooing along happily whenever it hit one of the keys which produced a bellowing noise instead of a proper tone.

Emily raised a questioning eyebrow at the Real Estate Ghoul and gave the ghost cow a friendly pat on the head. "When you said you had forgotten that it did this," Emily said, "did you mean the organ or the cow?"

The Real Estate Ghoul gave an apologetic shrug. "Both? But don't worry," she assured Emily, "there's another house nearby which I'm sure you'll love!"

* * *

Emily did not love the next house.

It was a much more manageable size that the first one, but it was made of gingerbread and candy.

"There's a company of elves from Christmas Town who have been putting these up all over town, so it you can be assured it was built by people with a long history of edible architecture. Just look at that craftsmanship," the Real Estate Ghoul said while gesturing to the decoratively exposed gingerbread ceiling supports which had been textured to look like woodgrain. "This design is traditionally very popular with witches, though candy plays a big enough part in Halloween celebrations that other Halloween Town residents have been snapping them up, too. This is the only one of its kind on the market right now and is likely to go fast."

Emily suspected Christmas Elves might be incredibly skilled in building things out of gingerbread somewhere with ground which was frozen solid all year, but they probably weren't used to building in warmer locations which carefully cultivated an atmosphere of fog and especially strong rising damp. The house's gingerbread floors seemed to be perpetually sticky, and Emily's shoes had already gotten stuck three times.

"Maybe somewhere where the floors are a little less soft?" Emily said. Her feet were stuck again, and only the Real Estate Ghoul's assistance allowed her to get them free without anything detaching along the way.

The Real Estate Ghoul dutifully crossed the gingerbread house off the list of possibilities without attempting to change Emily's mind.

* * *

The house after that appeared to be more of a cave than an actual house, and before Emily had a chance to protest that she really did not think this one was for her, she noticed a "SOLD" sign near the entrance.

The Real Estate Ghoul noticed it too. "Sorry, looks like this one is already taken," she said, immediately turning around and leading Emily back the way they had come. "My partner had an appointment to show it to a family of Devil Bears this morning. It would have been nice if he'd sent word that he'd closed the deal. Let's see," she muttered under her breath as she flipped through the papers on her clipboard, "what's next on the list? He can't have sold them all out from under me. Oh, how about we look at this one next?" She turned the clipboard so Emily could see the printout with a rough sketch of the house's floorplan and a photo of the exterior. "The listing for it just came in this morning. I haven't had a chance to visit in person yet, but it looks charming, and of the ones in the pile we haven't already been to today, it's the closest one to here. Doesn't it look charming?"

"Yes," Emily agreed, smiling, "it does." Maybe this next house would be the one, and it was only a short walk away.

* * *

A short walk later, Emily had reason to stop smiling.

This house was definitely not the one. While it had turned out to be very charming, it was only charming in a dollhouse kind of a way. Its roof only came up to just above Emily's waist.

"Sorry again," the Real Estate Ghoul said. "Someone must have left the paper on my desk by mistake. We have a sister agency which handles buildings scaled for smaller occupants. Or if it wasn't a mistake then a certain someone is going to have some serious explaining to do when I get back to the office." She pulled the listing out of the pile, crumpled it up and put it in her pocket. Then she paged through what remained in her clipboard. "How do you feel about homes without much yard space? There are a couple of places closer to the center of town which might suit you."

"Lead the way." Emily was certain that there was a place in Halloween Town for her, but Halloween Town also had places for so many other kinds of people and creatures that finding a suitable one for her was going to take more work than she had initially thought. She was not ready to give up, though, not even close. She was just glad that being dead meant her feet never got sore from too much walking, because it looked like she was going to have a lot more walking to do before this was all over.

* * *

The next house was also too small, but at least this time it was in the more usual sense of being too small.

"Just listen to these nightingale floors!" the Real Estate Ghoul exclaimed happily as she did a complicated dance to demonstrate how each floorboard made a unique squeak, squeal, groan, or sigh when stepped on. "They're perfectly in tune, both upstairs and down. Now that's craftsmanship."

The noisy floors were interesting, but Emily did not see them as quite the selling point that the Real Estate Ghoul seemed to. Emily had learned to do without a lot in the time since she'd died, but she wanted more than what was on offer here, and not just for herself.

"It's nice enough for one person, I suppose," Emily said, surveying the skinny room which made up the house's ground floor. The rear part of the room was a kitchen area, which she wouldn't need since eating was optional for the dead. She could not quite touch both walls at once with her outstretched arms, but it was closer than she would have liked. The open area which comprised the upstairs was not any better. "But what if I want to start a family?" She did not say that the family she had in mind was comprised of a married couple she had left behind in the land of the living but who wouldn't stay there indefinitely. Until it happened, it was no one's business but her own. And maybe Sally's. Talking about hopes and dreams like that were what friends were for.

The Real Estate Ghoul stopped dancing and made another mark on her clipboard of papers. "The next house is bigger," she promised.

* * *

The next house wasn't too bad.

It was a rowhome of good enough size and had a reasonably convenient location along the road between the town's main eastern gate and the main square. However, the Real Estate Ghoul warned Emily that there was the potential for a lot of road noise on certain days of the week, especially Tuesdays and Fridays, which were when the hook-handed fishermen and hook-handed fisherwomen who lived up and down the coast to the east of town brought their catch to market, clanging hooks and harpoons on every available hard surface as they went along so as to proudly announce their approach. The non-hook-hander fishermen, who brought their catch to market on Sundays, were a much less prestigious bunch, so they tended to slink quietly into town, making them less of a concern in regard to noise.

Going to and from the upper floors, Emily noticed that the stairs were steeper and more uneven than she would have preferred, but she was sure she wouldn't have any problems as long as she held onto the bannister and paid careful attention to making sure her leg did not fall off at any inopportune moments. Also, the ceilings were lower than Emily would have liked in most of the rooms. They weren't low enough to require her to stoop, but they reminded her just a little too much of being buried. It was still better than soft sticky floors or sharing far too much space with a spectral cow. Emily liked the idea of getting a pet, but not anything so big or with such a fondness for shouldering her out of the way to claim a keyboard for its own when she was trying to play.

"The walls bleed, too," the Real Estate Ghoul said, pointing at one of the walls after they had completed their tour of the house and returned to the foyer. "And even better, they only do it on command, so you can save it for special occasions if you don't want to bother with the constant cleanup." The wallpaper was a pattern of intertwining vines done in dark mauve on a lighter mauve background. Emily could imagine it would look very pretty with the first droplets of blood beading on the surface like berries on the vines.

She did not need much extra effort to imagine herself contentedly living here. "All it needs is a piano," she said aloud, though as soon as she did, she remembered that the walls of the house seemed a little on the thin side (perhaps the better to let the blood through?) so she would have to worry about annoying the neighbors when she inevitably got restless and wanted to play at odd hours, just as she always had in both life and death. Still, it was a better house than the others she had looked at so far.

Emily was about to tell the Real Estate Ghoul that this house was definitely one to consider, when a high, slightly raspy voice from the open front door said, "Did somebody say they wanted a piano?"

Emily turned and saw three small masked figures peeking into the house around the edge of the doorframe. Emily had seen them around town before but not had an opportunity to talk to any of them until now. They looked like costumed children, but she had been told they were really a trio of some variety of imp and were only pretending to be children. She had also been warned not to trust them further than she could throw them.

"We can get you a piano," the one in the green mask and witch costume (Shock, Emily thought she had heard someone call her) said.

"We can get one easy!" agreed the one in the white mask and skeleton costume. Emily was fairly certain that one was Barrel.

"Anything for a friend of the Pumpkin King and Queen," the one in the red horned mask and devil costume added eagerly. By process of elimination, he must be Lock.

"Wait right here!" the trio shouted in unison and ran off before either Emily or the Real Estate Ghoul could tell them that that wouldn't be necessary yet, if ever.

"What's the worst that could happen?" Emily asked the Real Estate Ghoul, who was staring out the open door after the departing imps with a vaguely worried expression on her furry face.

"Given their history, they're probably either going to bring you a piano they stole from somebody or something that isn't a piano at all, but worst case scenario could involve anything up to and including large-scale property damage. Let's hope they just stick to their usual low grade mischief and don't go beyond it."

"We could leave before they get back," Emily suggested. She disliked running away, but in this case it might be prudent.

The Real Estate Ghoul shook her head. "It wouldn't stop them," she said.

Lock, Shock, and Barrel returned in a surprisingly short amount of time, pushing a battered-looking but ornately carved upright piano in front of them and into the house.

"Here you go," said Lock.

"Just as we promised," said Shock.

"On time and under budget," said Barrel.

Emily eyed the piano. All things considered, it looked like a surprisingly high quality instrument. "How much do you want for it?" she asked suspiciously.

"And who did you take it from?" asked the Real Estate Ghoul, sounding even more suspicious than Emily.

The trio gasped in mock offense.

"We didn't take it from anyone," insisted Lock.

"Cross our hearts," said Barrel.

"And hope to never trick-or-treat again," said Shock.

"We swear," the three of them chorused, drawing invisible X shapes over their hearts and then lifting their masks just long enough to spit on the floor. The Real Estate Ghoul growled at that, but the trio continued blithely on as if they hadn't just made a mess someone else was going to need to clean up.

"And we don't want anything for it," Barrel told Emily.

"The first favor's always free," said Shock.

"Further favors are negotiable on a case by case basis," said Lock.

"Meetings at our treehouse are by appointment only," added Shock.

"If you need us, just ask around," said Barrel.

"For Lock." Lock bowed.

"Shock." Shock curtsied.

"And Barrel!" Barrel stole Shock's hat and tipped it politely to Emily.

Shock smacked Barrel in the back of the head and was clearly about to steal her hat back, but Lock beat her to it and went running out the door, cackling and waving the hat above his head, with Shock and Barrel in hot pursuit.

And just like that, Emily and the Real Estate Ghoul were left alone again, now with the addition of a piano.

"I guess I should at least test it," Emily said after a moment of contemplative silence. She reached to lift the cover from the keys.

"Careful," warned the Real Estate Ghoul. "Since it's really a piano and supposedly not stolen, they may have filled it with snakes."

"I'm not afraid of snakes," Emily said and lifted the lid.

There were no snakes inside. Nor were there scorpions, spiders, or any other venomous creatures left behind to spring out at, bite, or otherwise startle the unwary. There were a few thin dark cracks visible in the ivories, but the keys were dust free and polished to a shine.

In a blur of fingers and finger bones, Emily played a rapid fire progression through the scales, all the way from the highest to the lowest note on the keyboard. None of the keys produced any unexpected noises. Everything was perfectly in tune, but that is not to say that the instrument was without problems.

As soon as Emily stopped playing, the piano began to rumble, and a misty white shape rose up out of the top of it, wailing, "Whooooooo is playing my pianooooo withoooout my permissiooooon? I demand tooooo knoooooow!"

"Oh! I'm terribly sorry, sir," said Emily as she jumped away from the keyboard, feeling like she had just been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. "Lock, Shock, and Barrel swore they hadn't stolen this piano from anyone."

"Well that just figures," huffed the ghost and crossed his arms across his spectral chest in irritation. "Those three are always causing trouble."

"I guess they stole you right along with it and thus technically weren't lying," the Real Estate Ghoul told the ghost. "But I'm still going to give them a piece of my mind the next time I see them."

"Say, don't I know you?" asked the ghost, drifting down to peer more closely at her. "Aren't you the Real Estate Ghoul with the office just off the main square?"

"Um, yes? I could give you my business card if you'd like."

"No need," said the ghost, uncrossing his arms so he could wave one vaguely around in refusal. "I already have one somewhere." Then the ghost looked around, seeming to finally notice that he was not in the same building he had been in when he fell asleep in his piano. "Say," he said, "is this the house for sale on Black Lagoon Street? I've been meaning to ask you about it. May I take a look while I'm here?"

The Real Estate Ghoul cast a questioning glance in Emily's direction.

Emily shrugged a wordless 'why not?' in reply. She wasn't certain this house was the one for her anyway, and she felt that saying yes was the least she could do after having part in disturbing the ghost's rest in his piano.

"Thank you kindly, ma'am," said the ghost. "Feel free to play my piano as much as you want while I go look around." And then he flew away up the stairs.

Emily returned to the keyboard and began to play.

She had finished her favorite sonata and moved into one of the jazzier pieces she had learned from Bonejangles when the ghost returned from his inspection of the house, but he waited for her to finish before he told the Real Estate Ghoul, "This place is wonderful, and I'd like to put in an offer!"

"I'm sorry, but Miss Emily should have the chance to make the first offer if she wants," said the Real Estate Ghoul. "She was here first, after all."

"No, no, go right ahead," said Emily. "He seems to love this house more than I do."

"In that case," the Real Estate Ghoul told the ghost, "you can stop by my office tomorrow and we'll draw up the paperwork."

"Thank you again, Miss Emily. It's always a pleasure to meet a new musician, especially one as talented as you appear to be," said the ghost, reaching out and giving her an enthusiastic handshake. "Almost everyone in this town is a singer, but there aren't nearly so many instrumentalists. Say, that reminds me! There's a bar on Third Street that does open mic nights on Saturdays. Some friends and I like to get up there and just jam for as long as we can whenever there isn't anyone else waiting in the wings. You should come join us sometime. I think you'd fit right in."

"Thank you," Emily said, "I think I'd like that very much."

After that, they said their goodbyes and headed for the door, with the Real Estate Ghoul promising to send someone over to help move the ghost's piano back to his current home.

"Are you going to tell your partner you made a sale?" Emily asked as they walked away.

The Real Estate Ghoul's look of false innocence was worse than the acts Lock, Shock, and Barrel had put on. "Maybe later," she said.

* * *

The last house was just right.

"This place has had a lot of owners over the years," the Real Estate Ghoul said as she led Emily into the next room of the house. "Not that there's anything wrong with it! It's good, solid construction," she quickly added when she saw Emily raise a skeptical eyebrow. "If anything, it's too solid. Over a hundred years old, and it still hasn't developed any of that delightful character most local residents look for in a long-term home." She tapped the knuckles of both left hands heavily against the wall to demonstrate. The walls looked like they were just wallpaper over ordinary plaster and slats, but they sounded more like she was hitting a petrified tree. The Real Estate Ghoul gave Emily a 'what can you do?' shrug and them began walking down the hall again.

"It's that much of a problem?" Emily asked as she peered into one of the smaller upstairs rooms. Like the rest of the house, it had boldly patterned wallpaper and large windows which stretched nearly all the way up to the high ceilings. She knew if she looked out the window and down, she would see the sloping top of the glass-enclosed conservatory which stretched along the ground floor of that whole side of the house. A set of double doors, probably leading to a clothes closet, took up most of the space on the wall to the left of the one with the windows, while an ornate fireplace dominated the wall to the right. The fourth wall of the room was blank but would be a good place for hanging paintings or maybe a large mirror to create the illusion of extra space. Emily could imagine herself happily spending a lot of time in that room, especially if she could find a piano, specifically one which had not be acquired through theft, to put in it.

"Enough of a problem to lower the asking price below the average for its size and location," the Real Estate Ghoul said. "It might be another couple of centuries before the place so much as develops a properly squeaky floor or begins to creak and moan ominously in the night. All the previous residents got tired of waiting and upgraded to properly broken-in structures with some personality. Or, at least, most of the previous residents did. A few years back, around the time Jack Skellington first opened trade with the other holiday regions, the then-owner fell in love with some little visiting Easter chickie. He married her on the spot, and they ran off together to Beltaneville, where they seem to have been living happily ever since. It was quite the sensational news item at the time, him being the first monster in town to marry anything so cheerfully bright yellow and fluffy," the Real Estate Ghoul said, briefly bristling her own short spiky black and gray striped fur to emphasize the contrast, "though no one bats an eye when the same thing happens these days. And here's the master bedroom," she added.

"It's lovely," Emily said, and it was. The whole house was lovely and not too big or too small. However, Emily could not help but feel like something was missing to keep it from being absolutely perfect, and she did not mean the squeaky floors which the Real Estate Ghoul seemed to care so much about. She couldn't quite put her finger on what, though.

The master bedroom's layout was like a mirror image and scaled up version of the previous room that she had just seen. The house was being sold as mostly unfurnished, but a large canopy bed stood against the inner wall with its foot pointed towards the windows so that the bed's occupant or occupants (it looked large enough to more than comfortably hold three, should anyone ever be inclined to try) could wake to the dawn light pouring directly in on them if they chose to leave the curtains tied back. The bed frame was blackest ebony hung with striking dark red velvet curtains. Black sheets and pillows adorned the mattress, which was topped with a black duvet with a delicate paisley pattern picked out in in threads of varying shades of tarnished silver.

A small, ragged piece of fabric, looking like a black and white and orange scrap of old patchwork quilt, was spread out across the center of the duvet. Emily was about to ask the Real Estate Ghoul if someone had left a dusting rag on the bed, but when she touched it, it jerked under her hand with a startled "mrek!" noise and then pulled itself to float slightly above the bed as a little pointy-eared, calico-colored sheet ghost.

"Sorry about that," the Real Estate Ghoul said when she noticed what had happened. "She must have wandered in not long after the previous owners moved out. But you know how it is with cat ghosts," she said with another 'what can you do?' shrug, "once they decide they want to be somewhere, not even exorcism spells can keep them out for long. This house isn't officially on the books as haunted, but that's what it is until she finds somewhere else she wants to spend her time or gets tired of being dead and decides to reincarnate into her next set of nine lives." She sighed. "I'll just need a moment to make a note to update the listing and then we can go look at the next place."

"I don't think that'll be necessary," Emily said, smiling. While the Real Estate Ghoul had been talking, the ghost cat had drifted over to Emily, delicately sniffed at her fingers, and then, seeming to approve of what she found, began purring and butting her little calico head against Emily's hand in an obvious demand for petting. Emily had happily obliged, certain that she had found that previously undefinable something she had previously felt the house was missing. Now, still gently scratching the ghost cat behind the ears with one hand, she reached out and patted the bedroom wall with the other. "I'll take them both."

She couldn't wait to tell Sally.

**The End**


End file.
